Monday, March 12, 2012

Three academics who'd taught intro courses on game history described what methods had worked, and what methods hadn't, for teaching game history. Which made the title something of a disappointing bait-and-switch. Not that I'm opposed to the idea, but the discussion of the need was more interesting to me. It was also somewhat limited, in that none of the teachers had gone beyond Intro-level courses on the subject. That said, it was still pretty fascinating to see evidence of the things that did work, or not, in teaching potentially interested students, and the presenters were consistently intelligent and occasionally entertaining.

Game Educators Rant!

I was slightly disappointed with these rants, in large part because I'm somewhat outside the target audience. I'm academically sympathetic (aca-curious?), probably far more than the average GDC attendee, so I'm somewhat familiar with many of the ideas. Ian Bogost's rant was either aimed too far or too close to home for me to really engage with. On the other hand, one about the tyranny of pixelated platformers as innovation was pitch-perfect, and I really needed to hear another, going up against games as spectacle in the face of climate change.

The Gamification of Death: How the Hardest Game Design Challenge Ever Demonstrates the Limits of Gaming

I'd heard good things about the presenter, Margaret Robertson, and when Sid Meier's presentation was too full, I headed to this one. She did not disappoint, explaining with good humor and intelligence all the different ways that she tried, and failed, to create a game based on the tragic death of a missing person. Something stopped me from really feeling totally engaged, though, possibly that I missed the first 15 minutes, or possibly that her conclusions led to far more questions than the bulk of the presentation.

Civilization V: Gods & Kings preview

A twitter follower/PR person sent me an email inviting me to this, at a hotel across from the convention center. I went, met some PR people, then got a demo of the new features from the lead producer and designer on the game, followed by a 10-minute interview with the designer. I've talked some shit about preview culture in my day, but as a Civilization fan more than a reporter (though I took notes in case someone wanted a preview) it was actually pretty fun - and I'm looking forward to the expansion, as it may fix many of my issues with the original. Fingers crossed.

The Emotional Puppeteer: Uncovering the Musical Strings that Tie Our Hearts to Games

A presentation by one of Bungie's composers and a user researcher/musician who worked with him to try to decipher exactly what kinds of feelings people had when they heard various forms of music. Apparently male choruses make everyone think "ancient" which makes sense. But it went a little deeper than that. By trying out different combinations of music and videos, they could instigate different reactions in their subjects. I think what I enjoyed the most was that there was no final lesson to be learned -- it was more "hey, this is cool!" And it really was cool, especially seeing what combinations of songs and videos created completely different reactions than the pieces did individually.

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Mass Effect's greatest
strength is its setting. It presents a universe of staggering diversity
and complexity. It is well-populated, presenting your Commander Shepard
with a wide range of different situations to respond to and to shape
your character, which is integral to Mass Effect's character
development and entire narrative system. But that's not the only way
that the Mass Effect universe makes the game better. It also
connects Mass Effect by connecting it to many of the great science
fiction universes in the history of the genre, and it does so by moving
outside the normal SF setting used by video games.

Most science fiction games
use this as a premise: humanity is starting to explore beyond their
normal boundaries. They come across something alien, totally unexpected,
frightening, and most of all, dangerous. For example, Gears Of War
does not take place on Earth specifically, but it is humanity's push
towards the frontiers of their domain that leads to the disaster of
Emergence Day. In Halo, initial exploration into space becomes
an all-out war with the Covenant followed quickly by the Flood. Or,
in the Half-Life series, experiments in dimensional travel lead
to war with an alien invasion force.

These can all be summarized
as "First contact goes horribly wrong" in one sense, but in
another, it's even simpler: most science fiction video games take their
cues from the Alien film series. In the first Alien, the
main character, Ripley, is the member of an exploratory spaceship which
uncovers an alien killing machine, forcing her to survive by her wits
and whatever is available. The discovery of horrifying, murderous alien
life is a staple of games, from Doom to Half-Life to
Dead Space.

In the sequel, Aliens, Ripley returns to the
planet which housed the aliens, with a squad of elite soldiers. For
all their bravado, the squad is quickly decimated, forcing the smaller
and smaller number of survivors into increasingly desperate measures,
ending with Ripley confronting the alien queen by herself. The initially
militaristic opening with an increasing focus on individual heroics
against an implacable, dominant alien force brings to mind the original
Halo and Gears Of War. There are no negotiations, no conversations.
The world is filled with violence and desperate attempts to survive.

Mass Effect's universe,
on the other hand, is filled with a range of aliens willing to negotiate,
converse, and perhaps fight as a last resort. The big enemies of the
game, the Reapers, are totally alien in this world, as they exist only
to destroy. Commander Shepard great political struggle over the course
of two games is convincing the political leaders of the galaxy that
these enemies - evil incarnate - actually exist. Everyone else is used
to problems with political solutions.

This is what separates Mass
Effect from the vast majority of science fiction games, and makes
it comparable to some of the best science fiction settings of all time
The vibrant universe of Mass Effect may seem initially comparable
to the two great science fiction properties, Star Wars and
Star Trek. But Mass Effect's
setting is different from those two. Most Star Trek stories are
built around exploration, with space as "the final frontier".
Meanwhile, Star Wars presents a universe that has always been,
with humans as the dominant species of the galaxy. Mass Effect
portrays humans as late arrivals to the galactic scene - but arrivals
which threaten a precarious balance of power.

In the 1980s and early 1990s,
a newer style of science fiction epic became commonplace in literature.
In David Brin's 1983 novel Startide Rising, humans are a "wolfling"
race, which developed intelligence and interstellar travel on its own,
causing them to be frowned upon by a conservative galactic order. When
a human ship discovers a ancient artifact believed to be related to
the "Forerunners", perhaps the original spacefaring race in
the galaxy, it triggers a massive galactic conflict, as the humans try
desperately to survive, build alliances, and discover what the hell
the artifact means. Sound familiar? Startide Rising seems
to wield the same crucial influence on Mass Effect that George
R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice & Fire is to Bioware's Dragon
Age.

Startide Rising isn't
the only piece of classic science fiction literature to have echoes
in Mass Effect. In Sheri S. Tepper's 1989 novel Grass,
a huge, living plant-like organism exerts mental control over the world's
colonists, much like Mass Effect's Thorian. And the climactic
scene where the Reaper Sovereign reveals the AI plans, motivations,
and sheer disdain for life is reminiscent of the Technocore from Dan
Simmons' classic novel Hyperion. Finally, the scenes on the Citadel
that comprise much of the first portion of the game seem much like the
most literary of science fiction television shows, Babylon 5,
a show whose humans also upset the galactic balance of power, and started
working to make it better. In Mass Effect II, the centrality
of the Cerberus organization and the game's darker, more conspiratorial
tone aligns it with shifts in the science fiction styles of the 1990s,
much like the hopefulness of Star Trek: The Next Generation morphed
into the grittier Deep Space 9.

Part of what makes all of these
stories so successful is that they have a history, a feeling that this
is a wider universe. Mass Effect does better than most games
at making its setting feel lived-in. The First Contact War between the
humans and turians provides some background, but Mass Effect
does best when describing the history of the tough, violent krogan peoples.
The krogan history - their uplift (a term taken from Startide Rising),
their defeat of the rachni, their rapid and dangerous expansion, and
their depressing defeat at the hands of a fertility-suppressing bioweapon
- provides many of the best moments in both games, most notably the
assault on Saren's breeding pens in the first game and Mordin's loyalty
quest in Mass Effect II.

But the Mass Effect
games' storylines generally don't flow from the dense, varied history
of the universe as well as the krogan-based plots do. None of the three
major council races, the asari, salarian, or turian races have anywhere
near as complex history as the krogan. This is the main thing preventing
Mass Effect's universe from having the strength of the classic SF
literature stories. Yet Mass Effect is remarkably successful
at evoking those stories even if it doesn't quite match them. Its universe
is one of the most successful settings in mainstream game history, but still behind the very best of science fiction settings across different mediums.